


last call (for a second chance)

by coalitiongirl



Category: Once Upon a Time (TV)
Genre: F/F, Roni's Bar (Once Upon a Time), s7
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-28
Updated: 2018-03-28
Packaged: 2019-04-13 22:58:44
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,025
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14122677
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/coalitiongirl/pseuds/coalitiongirl
Summary: Regina pours a thumbful of whiskey for Emma and leans back, keeping that casual smile on her face for onlookers. “Anything but rum, huh? Sounds like a story there.” Sounds like afantasy, but Regina knows better than to believe that Emma would ever–Emma eyes her, something wistful in her gaze, and she drinks back the whiskey and says, “Yeah.”Regina’s heart catches in her throat. “Bad breakup?” she dares to ask.“Bad divorce,” Emma retorts.





	last call (for a second chance)

**Author's Note:**

  * For [dc4me44](https://archiveofourown.org/users/dc4me44/gifts).



> This was supposed to be Tumblr fic but it seems a little more polished than usual so I figured I would post it here! It's still unedited though because what am I even _doing_ , writing tonight. i am busy. but we all needed some fic, right?? right?? just me?? WHATEVER. 
> 
> This takes place during S7 except I haven't seen S7 at all so any references to canon are via some Wikipedia skimming and Twitter osmosis. There aren't very many references to canon though, so hopefully it won't be too jarring! The prompt is at the end of the fic.

Emma is in the bar.

 

Regina stares for just an instant before she drops her gaze, remembering that she isn’t meant to react. There are eyes on her that she doesn’t trust, people who might put two and two together if Regina shows any sign of being someone other than Roni, friendly proprietor of a bar and nothing more. But it’s definitely _Emma_ , glancing around and then freezing as she catches sight of Regina behind the bar.

 

She moves closer. Regina forces a vague smile onto her face. “What can I get you?” Another casual glance around the room, eyes flickering to see if she’s being watched. There are eyes on her, and so she doesn’t say anything to Emma, who’s staring at her as though she’s a ghost.

 

“Anything but rum,” Emma says finally, and she slides onto a barstool and misses the way that Regina’s eyebrows shoot up. “You been here long?”

 

“My whole life,” Regina says, watching Emma guardedly. This is playing with fire, and she needs to get Emma out of here so she can tell her the _truth_ , so they can work through this together and–

 

 _God_ , Emma’s here. She turns to get the whiskey and blinks away tears that threaten to spill, her heart in her throat. It’s been so long without her now, though time has gotten even more muddled in the years since she’d left Storybrooke. It had been long enough before she’d left, too. The years between Emma’s marriage and Henry’s departure had been a quiet sort of hell, and it had only gotten worse once she’d been fully alone. She’d been relieved to escape Storybrooke, and she hadn’t expected it to follow her _here_ , still wearing a red jacket and looking as though she hasn’t aged a day.

 

She pours a thumbful of whiskey for Emma and leans back, keeping that casual smile on her face for onlookers. “Anything but rum, huh? Sounds like a story there.” Sounds like a _fantasy_ , but Regina knows better than to believe that Emma would ever–

 

Emma eyes her, something wistful in her gaze, and she drinks back the whiskey and says, “Yeah.”

 

Regina’s heart catches in her throat. “Bad breakup?” she dares to ask.

 

“Bad divorce,” Emma retorts, pushing her tumbler back to Regina. Regina’s fingers skitter on the glass for a moment, and she forces herself to breathe in, then out, then in again. Emma watches her, a hint of suspicion germinating in her eyes. “Sorry, what did you say your name was?”

 

“I’m Roni. From the sign?” Regina says archly, turning to hide the flush of her cheeks. When she turns back, she has the whiskey again, and she leaves the bottle on the bar and falls silent. She isn’t going to solicit any more information from Emma and arouse more suspicions, even though she craves every detail about Emma’s life she can get. Emma looks better now, brighter and happier than she’s been in years, and it feels…healing. _Good_ , in a way that it hasn’t been to be around Emma in a long time. 

 

Emma drinks in silence, and Regina helps other customers and chats with regulars and tenses every time Emma sets her glass down. But Emma doesn’t leave, and when the bar is quieting down again, Regina ventures, “So, bad divorce. Did you come to Hyperion Heights for a fresh start?”

 

Emma laughs, and it’s a bitter sort of pitched laugh that Regina recognizes all too well. “I came here for…my family,” she says, her eyes boring into Regina’s. “But I don’t think they’re here, after all.” Regina can’t answer. Emma takes another drink. “I had a pregnancy scare about a year ago. I guess it kind of put things into perspective.”

 

“Perspective?” Regina repeats. She cleans a glass absentmindedly, flashing a smile to a new customer and drifting to him on automatic.

 

By the time she’s done with him, Emma’s ready to talk. “I kind of figured…find a guy and your happy ending is all set, you know?” she says, brooding at her reflection on the whiskey bottle. “That’s what happened to my parents. Yeah, things were rough for them, but they always had each other, and they were stronger for it. So I assumed it’d be the same for me.” She laughs, self-conscious as she looks up at Roni. “I’m sorry. You don’t even know me.”

 

She can’t stop _now_ , and Regina finds herself falling into old habits, finding the words that had been so easy to maneuver people with when she’d been Mayor Mills, the only one who’d known the truth. “I feel almost as though I do,” she says, flashing Emma a slow smile. “There’s something very familiar about you.”

 

Emma lets out a ragged little laugh. “Imagine that,” she says, leaning back in her chair. She stares upward for a moment before she turns her gaze back on Regina. “It wasn’t until we went to the doctor and discovered the pregnancy test was a false positive that I kind of finally realized…” She rubs her eyes, laughing helplessly. “I thought I’d be heartbroken, but I was so _relieved._ It was like I’d been walking around with a massive weight on my shoulders and I hadn’t even realized until someone had rolled it off.”

 

“You didn’t want a baby?” Regina says, and she searches through her memories, tries desperately to recall any moment where Emma had seemed unsure or unhappy. She only remembers Emma beaming with that weak smile on her face, the one that she’d wanted to believe had been false for years. Then Emma had married the man, had been pregnant with his child, and she had been forced to admit to herself that she’d seen what she’d wanted to.

 

Emma doesn’t smile like that now. She doesn’t smile at all. Her eyes are thoughtful and solemn, and she says, “I didn’t want _his_ baby. I don’t know if I wanted a baby. I have– I had a son,” she whispers suddenly, and Regina watches her in dismay as her lip wavers. “I had a son, and I left him behind because there was supposed to be this _life_ I had to live without him– without…”

 

She holds out her glass, her hand trembling, and Regina pours her another glass. There are tears sliding silently down her cheeks, and she stares up at Regina with naked yearning on her face, so much that it stuns Regina to silence. “Without the woman I loved,” she says brokenly, and Regina drops the glass she’s cleaning on the floor.

 

It shatters and shatters the moment with it. Emma stares at her with slowly dawning recognition, and Regina says weakly, “But your husband–“

 

Emma laughs, a little wildly. “God. Don’t call him that. He was a fucking asshole, and I went along with it because I thought– I thought this was what I was supposed to be. I thought I was supposed to fall in love and write my own fairytale, but I never even picked up the pen myself.” She blinks away more tears, and she watches Regina through them, doesn’t tear her eyes away from Regina’s gaze. “And she was always there with me, and there was always this _thing_ between us, you know?”

 

 _Yes._ Yes, she knows. She bobs her head and Emma sucks in a deep breath. “I guess we both kind of knew it was there, because things changed after the wedding. We stopped going out of our way to see each other. We talked, but it was always…light. Casual. Like we were afraid of what might happen if we ever let things get too intense. And then I lost her,” Emma says blankly, and Regina blinks away tears of her own. “I lost her. She left, and I missed her all the time. I couldn’t stand not seeing her face at the diner in the morning, even if we were barely talking. I couldn’t stand driving past her house and seeing the lights out, or knowing there was someone else at her desk at Town Hall, or–“ She gulps down more whiskey, and reaches for the bottle.

 

Regina knows Emma’s limit, has known it as intimately as she’d once known Emma herself, and she pulls the bottle away. “I’m cutting you off,” she murmurs, what had once been a playful comment to end to their nights drinking together, and Emma tucks her hair out of her face and stares at Regina through a sheen of tears. “I think…” Regina whispers, and she clears her throat and struggles to keep her voice even. “I think that if you really did have something like that between you two, then you’ll never really lose her. People have a way of finding each other.”

 

Emma’s chest rises and falls rapidly as she struggles to regain her composure. “Yeah,” she says, and she’s staring at Regina with her eyes sharp and wanting, with her eyes so rich with a dozen meanings that Regina can’t tear her own gaze away.

 

“Last call,” Regina calls out abruptly, and she walks unsteadily away from Emma, her fingers digging into the bar. It feels as though she might topple over if she lets go; if she moves back in Emma’s direction; if she dares to look Emma’s way.

 

There are a few more drinks, the last few customers dispersing, and when she turns back, Emma is gone. She lets out a cry of despair. _No_. They’d been so _close_ , nearly where they’d needed to be, _no_. Emma is– Emma had said–

 

She blinks back more tears, wipes them away and cleans tables mechanically and replays that encounter over and over in her head until she isn’t entirely sure that she hadn’t imagined it. The odds of Emma– _her_ Emma, who had never been hers at all– Emma leaving Hook? Infinitesimal. The odds of Emma coming here and confessing–

 

– _the woman I love_ –

 

“It’s a trick,” she says aloud in the empty bar. “It’s a lie.” Someone in Hyperion Heights has done something to her, has used her secret dreams against her, and she’s fallen for it without a second thought. Emma doesn’t _love_ her. Emma isn’t here at all, and she just has to– get it together and go _home_ and live this empty, lonely life where even her son doesn’t remember who she is.

 

Maybe this is all her punishment for running. She _had_ run, had fled the world in which Emma had been ready to share a son with someone else and given up on seeing her again. She hadn’t wanted to be taunted with _maybe_ and _what could have been_ , and instead she’d had the most vivid hallucination she could have possibly had of…

 

She turns absently after she’s done locking up, and her eyes widen. Through the window on the door, she can see the bottle of whiskey still on the bar, nearly empty.

 

Then it hadn’t been–

 

“People have a way of finding each other, huh?” Emma says from the shadows. She’s leaning against the wall of Roni’s, her eyes bright and soft as they regard Regina. “We’ve gotten pretty good at it over the years.”

 

“Emma,” Regina breathes, and they’re moving toward each other in an instant. Emma is cupping Regina’s face in her hands a moment later, and it feels _right_ , home again after so many years away.

 

Regina shakes her head, her face shining, and Emma says with mischief glinting in her eyes, “Sorry, I didn’t catch your name again, do you mind repeating–“

 

“Shut up,” Regina says fervently, and presses her lips to Emma’s.

 

The world doesn’t stop turning, but it does sort of shudder a bit and then realign, back on track after years off-center. Regina is kissing Emma and Emma is kissing her back, is stroking away Regina’s tears with her thumbs, is whispering voiceless declarations in every kiss. They hold each other in the shadows beside the bar, and Regina breathes out words that might be _I missed you_ and might be _I needed you_ and might be _I love you_.

 

It might only be _you found me_.

**Author's Note:**

> The Tumblr prompt was _Okay prompt. Emma is divorced from Hook, goes to HH thinking they're all under a curse. Confesses to Roni why she divorced and confesses her feelings for Regina in same conversation. Has no idea Roni knows who she is. Rest is up to you._


End file.
